How long am I here for? Oh who’s to say, boy. We’ve got a cottage on the island, so I suppose it’s really up to me how long I’m here for. Where? It’s out on the spur, right out where the lane starts bolting back and forth like a silly little rabbit. Near the end. It takes an age to drive out there and it knackers your suspension and in fact… it’s a lot easier if you just walk it, if you don’t mind the distance. I still don’t really mind it even in my age. That must be why I’m such a sturdy old goat to this day.
Max dropped bread in the toaster without looking. He read the jagged little letter again from the beginning. It arrived at some point last night, shoved through the letterbox with no envelope, a loose sheaf of note paper ripped from a spiral spine. It had been two days since the final blow up.
We are moving to Berlin. I’ve been making that statement of intent to anybody who will listen for the past few months. I think (hope) we’re past the stage where I need to make that statement over and over to make it happen now. It has an inertia of its own. I have a job out there. Sarah has a job out there. I think it’s happening. By the end of January 2023, we should be living in Berlin.
Right now a lot of people are talking about leaving Twitter (here’s mine). Many of those that go ahead with it and turning up in Mastodon (here’s mine) and talking a big game about how the collapse of Twitter will beget a golden age for the decentralised internet. That’s nice. I don’t believe it’s really going to be that simple, though.
On the topic of decentralised internet things: the FBI seized the Z-lib ebook archive! That’s a big pity given how hard it is to get ebooks without giving Amazon money. The Z-lib archive is not lost; some brave souls are maintaining the underlying archive. Here are some older, less illegally shared files including an account of the fall of the Berlin wall shared in 2001.
First I have a whole collection of maps. There’s a map to show where in the world Wikipedia edits are coming from. There’s a map that shows all the different kinds of planning boundaries that overlap the in Britain. There’s an incredibly detailed weather map. Finally, here’s a whole series of maps that examine how much various governments fudged their COVID-19 infection, hospitalisation, and mortality rates.
Take these for the pain
twice daily after eating
Take these for a headache
and these for your tired legs
Take these for a pain in the neck
in the mornings
Take these if you miss your train
And you can’t see the funny side
Take these if you suffer
Take these for loss
or a twinge in the heart
Take them in the evening
Stand by a window you can’t see out of
Take with water and look into the dark
For as long as you can bear
POSTING. Why must you post? Why must the thoughts you have be assessed in public for their value? Be boring or interesting to yourself. For the sake of thinking unthinkingly don’t show your thoughts to others. Otherwise, you’ll never be able to think without an audience.
I’m interviewing for other jobs. It’s a very strange process that sometimes feels like having a professional affair. You arrange off-the-calendar meetings with some exciting new thing, because the old one has turned sour.
I’ll stop myself before I go to deep on the “jobs are like relationships” simile, which I don’t really believe in. What I want to say is it’s a tiring situation to both have a job and be applying for jobs. The interview process for tech jobs is particularly time consuming, although not as time consuming as other fields, I’m sure. Also, I have to remind myself that tech jobs are relatively well paid so maybe you should have to work pretty hard for your money.
First I have this amazing oral history of the production of certain aspects of the video game Red Alert 3. Specifically the story is about how this incredible cut scene, starring Tim Curry as a high camp Soviet general blasting off into space, came to be. It’s astonishingly detailed and manages to go far beyond “pretty funny clip”. It talks about how casting and producing these little fragments of video for video games works. It answers the question of how in on the joke various parties are. Finally, it’s a tribute to how much Tim Curry threw himself into the ridiculous brief.
We’ve had successive record high temperatures everywhere, but most importantly to me, in London. There was a bit of respite for a week or so but yesterday the humidity starting rising and today the temperature will follow. I don’t think I’ll find 28° intolerably hot after getting used to almost 40° a couple of weeks ago, but the humidity doesn’t make it easy.
Hyde Park is parched. The leaves have fallen off the trees weeks early, which I’m told is some sort of survival technique. The high winds that saw off the last heat wave were so violent they cracked the window. I do feel particularly at the whims of an angry Earth god many orders of magnitude larger than myself. In the meantime, I try and keep the electricity consumption down, submit my meter readings, and brace for the next hike in energy prices.
